Saturday, 19 January 2013

Like it. Your New Year's Resolution.

A new thing happened to me in November: someone posted a bad
review of one of my books on Amazon. Not a badly written review, I should add,
but a review that judged one of my books to be bad. ‘Junk’, I believe, was the
word used. The reviewer described my plot as ridiculous, which isn’t at all an
unfair comment because in certain respects it is. But then, James Bond films
are ridiculous and we still enjoy them. In ‘AFK’ – the book in question – I
created an unlikely Second Life® scenario in order to create ‘adventure
tension’; in my latest novel, ‘AFK, Again’ I’ve attempted to do the same.

I’m not particularly bothered by having received a bad
review for two reasons. First, as a self-published author on the Internet – as,
in fact, any sort of author – I can’t expect to put my work out there and have
everyone love it. If I can’t take a bit of criticism, then I should probably
keep my work to myself. In this respect, receiving a bad review feels a little
bit like a badge of honour. ‘AFK’ is
free as a Kindle download on Amazon, but the reviewer made no acknowledgement
that what they were criticising was something they had paid no money for; they
treated my novel no differently from any other book – paid for or not – and it
feels good to be judged at that level.

Second – perhaps more importantly – this is the first and
only (so far) piece of negative feedback I’ve ever had on ‘AFK’ in the five
years of its publication. Every single other comment I’ve received has ranged
from mildly positive to glowing. Fifteen people have left positive comments on
my web site, three have done so on Amazon.com, four on Smashwords and I’ve
received five positive reviews/ratings on Goodreads. In addition to this, the
novel’s been positively reviewed by four other bloggers in their own blogs,
including New World Notes. So that’s one bad review out of 32 published. Less
than 5% – or, to express that another way – over a 95% approval rating. In
addition to this, I must have received easily at least 20-30 IMs in SL from
other readers about the book over the years, all positive.

Enough people appear to like my book, then, that I can
continue for now to believe it a worthwhile employment of the written word.
There’s just one problem. Although I
know that over 95% of the people who’ve read ‘AFK’ and left a review of some
description have liked it, that fact isn’t going to be apparent to a visitor to
Amazon.com, where now only three out of four – 75% – of the reviews are
positive. That single bad review has dropped my approval by a whole 25%
because, although ‘AFK’ has been downloaded over 1,600 times from Amazon.com
over the last year, only four people so far have left a review. That’s just a
quarter of 1% of all downloaders. The situation’s not much better on
Smashwords, where four reviews have been left after 800 downloads: a half of 1%.

When you’re an independent artist of any description – in
other words, someone without a large advertising budget or a big name to
guarantee you shop window space or above the fold positioning on popular
websites – reviews, ratings and likes are probably the most important thing
there is so far as the long-term credibility of your work is concerned. We all
hope for the video or picture or excerpt of our work that will go viral and
become next week’s Big Thing across the planet – this being the most publicised
way that completely unknown people receive world-wide exposure – but the
reality is that most such incidents occur with complete randomness; in any
case, if your viral attempt doesn’t include a cat in some manner, then you can
pretty much forget it (which reminds me, I really must dig out some of those
old photos of the tortoiseshell I had when I was growing up and think up a
witty, anthropomorphising caption to add as she looks into the camera). For the
vast majority of us, then, the route to establishing ourselves in the new world
market of digital products is in getting our work reviewed and appreciated.

The political point of anything ‘indie’ is that it
represents choice that isn’t available via the mainstream. There’s nothing
inherently wrong with mainstream products, but it’s important to remember that
these items – purchased in their millions – are selected for you by a very
small and – arguably – non-representative group of people. This small group of
people effectively get to decide on what you will see and hear and read. Indie
offers you an alternative.

Just as there’s nothing inherently bad about mainstream
products, however, there’s nothing inherently good about independently produced
ones. A self-published book could be brilliant, mediocre or – as my own
unsatisfied reviewer declared – junk. The indie scene could be likened to a
lucky dip in terms of quality – a vast, enormous, endless lucky dip as more and
more people plunge into unregulated self-publishing of one sort or another – if
it wasn’t for the fact that the same medium which enables individuals to make
their work available also enables other people to give an indication as to
whether it’s any good or not. The Internet is the medium which has liberated
independent artists in terms of making their work accessible to an
international audience; user feedback is the mediating mechanism which actually
makes such a thing practical. But we have to use it for that to work.

These days, the line between mainstream and independent
products is becoming increasingly blurred. When it comes to writing,
self-publishing is still regarded by many with disdain, even though the written
word was the very first unit of creation to be liberated by the Internet. Few
people experience similar reservations when it comes to downloading Apps for
their smartphones, however, many of which are the products of small companies
or individuals developing from their bedrooms. We don’t really care about the way
in which an app was produced so long as we enjoy the end result and the ratings
system is there to guide us in our purchase. But what we mustn’t forget is that
the very variety that’s pushed as a selling point of smart phones – as
immortalised by the slogan, “There’s an App for that” – exists precisely
because this market makes no distinction between products developed by large
companies and those by bedroom programmers. Right from the start, the two have
been treated exactly the same and as a matter of necessity: just think how
slowly the smartphone market would have developed if only large companies were
able to bring software to it.

Second Life, of course, is utterly dependent on
independently produced products; there is no ‘non-indie’ industry to speak of
in the metaverse – everything we wear and use and live in has been designed by
a resident. Even the large clothing labels are usually just a single designer
and a small collection of staff. One of the reasons that I refuse to fall out
of love with SL is its implementation of a modern-day digital cottage industry,
one which I see as a model for a much wider industry across the entire
Internet. When the web first achieved mass take-up in the late nineties, people
used to talk about the liberation it offered artists of all descriptions from
the big industries of recording and publishing. Unsigned musicians could get
their work out to a larger audience. Artists could get create virtual
galleries. And writers could find a following for their work. There was an
unspoken understanding that the huge riches awarded to the fortunate few that
made it through the funnel under the old system were unlikely to be found by an
enlarged group of active creators, but an honest living was never considered
out of the question.

If only it were the case that consumers since then had started
exploring the work of its lesser-known artists on a scale that changed the
relationship society has with its culture; sadly, the main effect so far has just
been to threaten the existence of big media through the illegal downloading of
the very music and films they were pushing on us in the first place. Our
imagination, so far, has failed us. But
this isn’t an opportunity that’s about to expire on us and, in fairness, it
takes a long time for old habits to be broken. Just like they said that the
Internet would kill TV and it hasn’t, we still seek – despite all the
technological advances – to encounter our culture through ‘trusted sources’. If
we – the consumers – would really like to see this ultimately change, there are
steps we can take right now about it.

One of those steps is to buy indie products from time to
time. Often, they’re more cheap than their mainstream equivalents. Sometimes –
like ‘AFK’ – they’re free. So it’s hardly a great financial risk.

But – and I cannot stress this highly enough – after you’ve
read or listened to or viewed it and if you liked the thing that you obtained, leave a rating. On Amazon.com, you only
have to leave a 20 word comment in addition to your stars and, if that’s really
asking too much, you can just click on the ‘like’ button for that book instead.
If you want independent producers to grow, do this to support them.

If you’re a person who’s bought or downloaded things and not
left feedback and are feeling now that my whining is nothing more than a guilt
trip, I’ll come clean on something: I am just like you. I don’t think I’ve ever
left feedback on anything I’ve ever bought from the SL Marketplace. The truth
is, it took a negative comment on my book to make me realise my own lack of
support for others. I will be doing something about this in 2013: my new year’s
resolution is to leave feedback on things I enjoy as often as I can, even if
it’s just a twenty word statement; even if it’s just to click a ‘like’ button.